2. Advantages of Long Words.
(1) Sound and Sense.—While long words are less easily interpreted than short ones, there are grounds for their moderate use. Majesty is so connected with magnitude that the length of the word is often natu¬rally suggestive of the grandeur of the conception, while little words connect pettiness with the thought. There is an "eternal fitness" in the adaptation of the lengtb of words to the sense ; of which Pope says : "A vile conceit in pompous words express'd Is like a clown in regal purple dress'd ; For different styles with different subjects sort, As several garbs with country, town and court" * (2) Actual Eoonomy.—A more important consid. oration is, that long words often express what could be otherwise expressed only by a still longer compound, or an awkward circumlocution. It is, doubtless, simpler and more intelligible to say, "the expansibility of gas," than to say, the "power of gas to be made to fill a greater space ;" or, "the indestructibility of matter," than, "the want of power in matter to be put out of being." But long words are often used not so mach on account of their expressiveness, as from ostentation. They giie a sonorous fullness to empty thoughts, and an outward majesty to vulgar sentiments. Beranger,f in one of his songs, not unhappily compares preten¬tious expressions to a big, gaudily dressed drum-major, and those of modest simplicity to the quiet little Napo¬leon at Austerlitz, clad in his plain gray coat. There is much force in this comparison, and the growing ten¬dency to use "long-tailed words in -osity and -ation," merely for the sake of using them, shows a lamentable deficiency of good taste and good sense. H. Value of Saxon Illustrated from Literature. Even the redemptive feature of their exquisitely musical arrangement and almost unequaled imagery, has not preserved such writers as Sir Thomas Browne and Jeremy Taylor from neglect by a generation of fowlers who are unwilling to trace out such words as, "nmorevalezza," "illaqueation," " immarcefscible," and " salertiousness." Writers must pay the penalty of their ambition for "eighteen-inch words," as Hor¬949 calls them, for the age is impatient with glossaries. The experience of writers and the philosophy of men¬tal action confirm the observation of Lord Stanley, that "it is the plain Saxon phrase far more than any term lx rrowed from Greek or Latin literature that, whether it, speech or writing, goes straightest and strongest to tnen's heads and hearts." Yet it is not because words are Saxon that they are forceful ; it is rather because they are centers of significance without useless syllabic appendages. A Latin term is as expressive as any other if it be brief and familiar and well charged with mean¬ing. It is fashionable to decry all words of Latin origin, but, as Sir Francis Palgrave has said of our language, "the warp may be Anglo-Saxon, but the woof is Ro¬man as well as the embroidery, and these foreign ma¬terials have so entered into the texture, that, were they plucked out, the web would be torn to rags, unraveled and destroyed." * While, therefore, Saxon terms are often preferable on account of their brevity, Latin de¬rivatives are not to be despised.